by Agnete Friis
“Now. It has to be right now.”
I looked at my watch. It was almost five-thirty in the afternoon. A trip by public transportation was not an option. Out here, the buses only ran till four.
“What about tomorrow? Around lunch time. Where exactly in Aalborg do you live?”
“No, that won’t work. Eight o’ clock tonight will suit me fine.”
I bit my lip. Troels Pinholt was in all likelihood a pest. I recognized his attitude from my neighbors in Hvidovre; now ingratiating, now utterly obtrusive, and once they realized they had something to offer you, they knew how to pester you and draw out their advantage as long as possible. Attention was a rare commodity in Ghost Town.
“Okay . . . give me your address. I’ll come to you. Tonight.”
A renewed bout of coughing camouflaged by what sounded like self-satisfied laughter. I already hated him. Troels Pinholt, ex-drug addict from Århus, one-time social misfit and pusher from Holstebro. I had no idea how to get to Aalborg by eight o’clock.
Down by the water Alex and Lupo had been joined by Thomas. The boys were playing catch with Lupo. I got up, gathered my sandals in one hand, and called to Alex as I made my way down to the water.
“Aalborg. Now? You may as well forget it, Ella. The buses aren’t running anymore. You could catch a train from Thisted, but you’d have to get to the station first.”
Thomas brushed a hand over his crew cut and smiled at Alex in the rear view mirror. He had insisted on driving us. He wouldn’t hear of us hitchhiking to Aalborg as I would have preferred. It was awkward with him, Alex and me all squashed into his little Honda.
“We can stop and pick up a couple of burgers on the way, if you guys are hungry. Grub’s on me.”
Alex smiled happily from the back seat. The window was rolled down a couple of centimeters and was letting the wind rush between his fingers. His upper body was still bare and he had kicked his flip-flops off under the seat in front of him. A film of sand clung to his legs and ankles.
“Sure,” I said, and lowered my gaze. “This is really kind of you.”
My debt to the world was increasing by the hour, and I hated it. The only thing I hated more was standing between Alex and a lousy burger.
“Who is this friend you want to visit in Aalborg?”
“Just an old friend. Alex doesn’t know him. I thought maybe you guys could hang out while I go and talk to him. It shouldn’t take more than an hour. Just a cup of coffee.”
I had tried to persuade Alex to stay at home—without success. He didn’t want to be alone with Barbara and I understood him perfectly.
“Sure. We can do that.”
Thomas swung off the road when we got to a McDrive in Thisted and bought junk food for an indecent amount of money. Three big meals plus a few extra burgers, nuggets, and fries on the side. I cut a glance at him when he came back to the car and passed the brown paper bags through the window. I had never seen him so lightly dressed before, T-shirt and shorts. He was unbearably thin. His arms were very tan, sinewy, pocked with small, shiny scars. He gulped down his meal and extra burgers without batting an eye before putting the car in gear and swinging back onto the road again.
“What would you like to do in Aalborg once we’ve dropped off your mom?” he said to Alex. “Do you want to catch a movie?”
There was a no on the tip of my tongue, but I bit my lip. Alex was beaming on the back seat. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to the movies, and I was pretty sure he couldn’t remember either.
We drove on in silence for a while. Thomas tuned into a local radio station, drumming his fingers on the wheel to some semi-crap, over-synced Danish pop. Medina and her angel-blond ex-boyfriend, Christopher. Justin Bieber took over, but he only managed to coo through half a song before I pounced on the radio and shut him up. I couldn’t help myself. It was an acute allergic reaction to anything that sounded like crying.
Alex sighed on the back seat, but Thomas just shot me a crooked smile.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “Sometimes I feel the same. When I was having chemo, I couldn’t bear hearing any kind of music at all. It was worse than torture. Even happy songs sounded like the soundtrack to Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3. For some reason, I used to think I would die with Jimi Hendrix strumming in my ears. Or Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor. But even that sounds like shit when you’re nauseous.”
“What did you have?”
“Testicular cancer. The doctors gave me a clean bill of health this spring, but I still need some time to get back on my feet. I’m not working full time. Just doing a couple of jobs for my dad.”
“I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
“Thanks.”
He looked nice when he smiled, and the silence that followed was warm as water in a tub. I settled down into it, dozing off on the last stretch to Aalborg.
Troels Pinholt lived in a ramshackle red-brick apartment building on a busy road in Aalborg Vesterbro. When the trucks rolled by, the glass in the panes of the building shook. There was no intercom at the port, so I just let myself in and found his name on the sanitary, grey metallic row of postboxes in the entrance. I bounded up the first two flights of stairs, but paused briefly on the landing of the third to consider my approach, half-hoping that he had changed his mind. I had forgotten my phone back in the house when we left, so theoretically, he could have called and cancelled.
Fuck. I rang the doorbell and could hear him coughing long before he opened the door. A protracted shuffling behind the peep-hole, a fumbling with the door chain, but finally the door opened.
“Ella?”
The man standing in front of me was a bum. No doubt about it. He was one of those men who spent their lives on a bench in front of Netto or Fakta Discount Store. A life that made all bums look exactly the same. The jeans that were soft and smooth with grime and wear. The hair that could do with a cut, but was slicked back instead—so severely that the path of the comb remained like deep, oily ridges over the scalp. There were those characteristically deep furrows on the forehead and a network of shot blood vessels spread over a translucent grey skin. Troels Pinholt smiled, completing the picture with a flash of stubbed teeth and a look in his eyes that was at once embarrassed and triumphant. A pall of old man, smoke, and cheap aftershave flooded onto the stairwell.
I cleared my throat. “Shall we talk here or go out?”
“If you buy me a round, we can go to Friheden. It’s just round the corner.”
I swore under my breath, but I couldn’t blame him. People like him—including myself—were apt to yank every one-armed bandit they got within twenty feet of. All I had on me was fifty kroner, but that ought to be enough for two pale ales at his local bar, and as far as I was concerned, he was welcome to drink them both, if this would spare me from going into his slum hole.
“Fine with me.”
He backed up, scraping his feet in the confines of his entrance, hung his keys on a band around his neck like a seven-year-old boy, and came shuffling after me on his worn-out shoes. When we got to the bottom of the stairs, he was already out of breath, and we had to take a break twice before we finally reached the bar on the corner only fifty feet away.
“COPD,” he said. “Smoker’s lungs,” he added with a cough. “A real bitch.”
He greeted the clientele in Friheden by rote. Mogens, Peter, Jytte, Noller, and Mette. Clearly everybody knew everybody else. I guessed that they hung out together every afternoon from 1 p.m. onward. And yet—or perhaps precisely for this reason—there was scant evidence of joy in the reunion. Merely raised eyebrows and a couple of curious glances in my direction from the men. The atmosphere was dead.
We picked a table at the back of the establishment. Friheden looked like every other bar I’d had the pleasure of frequenting over the years. Dark yellow curtains, brown wainscoting, and cigarette
smoke that billowed white in the poor lighting of marble-shaped lamps strung from the ceiling. On the walls, nicotine-stained beer advertisements from the ’50s that paid homage to the refreshing qualities of cold beers on hot summer days that contrasted sharply with the decrepit guests hunched over their glasses at the counter.
“Nice place,” I said.
“Yes. A sense of community—” he nodded, still doubled over to catch his breath. “—is heart-warming.”
I made my way to the bar and left Troels Pinholt to his own devices at our table, where he sat coughing up slime into a thick-bottomed ashtray. The two leather-skinned men on bar stools grunted over their glasses and stared at my ass as I sidled up next to them. The women, who were deep in their forties with hairdos sprayed stiffly into place and chipped nail polish, flatly ignored me.
When I got back to our corner I sat down opposite Troels and put a beer in front of him. “Tell me about Holstebro,” I said, leaning forward and resting my elbows on the table.
He shot me a wounded look. “No small talk?”
I shrugged. “What would you like to talk about?”
“Tell me a little about you. Where you come from . . . And why you are so interested in my mother’s house. It’s kinda . . . private, you know. My childhood home.”
It wasn’t an unreasonable request. And I needed to give him a few hints, anyway, if I wanted to extract any useful information out of him. I decided to put him in the picture, regard him as kind of alcohol-pickled search engine. Feed him key words and see what popped up on the blurry screen.
“My mother was murdered twenty-one years ago. My father killed her.”
“Oh . . . ” He looked at me intently over the rim of his glass. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”
“Yes.” I felt an unexpected lump in my throat. It was the depth of sincerity in his tone that surprised me. Five seconds of shared unhappiness.
“I’m trying to find out what happened,” I said. “My father was looking for something or someone who had seemed to have a connection to your mother’s address in Holstebro in the autumn of ninety-four. Can you tell me who was living there at that time?”
Troels frowned, playing the palm of his hand over the mouth of his bottle. “I don’t remember too good,” he said apologetically. “I was pretty fucked up in the nineties. Narcotics.”
He rested both forearms on the table and flipped them over to show me the scars on the insides of his elbow joints. It looked like an animal had clawed chunks of tissue and muscle out of his arms.
“Infections and the like,” he said, shifting his gaze from his own forearms to mine. “You’ve got a couple of souvenirs of sin yourself, I see.”
I shoved my arms under the table.
“But . . . 1994, you say. Nobody was living in the house at that time. My sister and I couldn’t agree on what to do with the house. I wanted to sell. I needed the money, but she was against it. Irritating cow, my sister. So anyway, the house stood empty for a couple of years in the nineties, I think, except for when I stayed over.”
“Alone?”
“Yes . . . that is, sometimes I had a girl with me.”
A hint of a lewd smile crossed his bloodhound face. The memory of erstwhile greatness, I guessed, perhaps some satisfaction at being able to tell a young woman that he’d once been a man who could get the likes of me into bed.
“Okay. Were you pushing anything? Throwing parties?”
He shook his head. “We were doing heroin. It’s a relatively unsociable drug, if you know what I mean. You basically sit around on your own and get stoned. Not like the party drugs—ecstasy, or whatever it is they’re called nowadays . . . ”
I pulled a home-rolled cigarette from my jacket pocket and offered him one. “My parents lived in Klitmøller. My father was a carpenter, a big man. Well-built. I think he gave the impression of being a solid man, dependable. My mother worked at the fish factory near Hanstholm and was more . . . frail, very pale, a little shy. She had freckles on her face.”
Troels shook his head again and took a few more slurps from his bottle of beer. “I might have seen them, but I doubt it. Not at the house, in any case. If we were pushing anything, we would have done it in town.”
“And what about your girlfriends? What were they like?”
He grinned again. A toothless Casanova. “Crazy, all of them. When you’re a junkie, like I was, that’s all you can get. I think most of them are dead now. If you don’t get onto methadone relatively soon, you die. I got treatment when I moved to Århus, and later, I got into rehab. I’ve stuck to alcohol ever since.”
“Did any of your girlfriends come to the house more often than others? Can you tell me more about them?”
There had to be something. There had to be a reason why my father asked my grandmother to check out that house.
“They’ve probably all been locked up by now. They were crazy, I’m telling you. Completely nuts. But nice tits, a lot of them.”
Hoarse laughter that tipped into an extended coughing fit that lasted for half my smoke.
“Tell me more about your mother,” he said finally.
“I think she was very lonely,” I said. “Her family didn’t want anything to do with her. They were very religious and didn’t approve of my father. She was completely alone out there by the North Sea.”
“Inner Mission?”
“No. Jehovah’s Witness. I met my aunt for the first time a couple of days ago. It was a . . . cold reception.”
“Jehovah’s Witness is a bitch,” said Troels Pinholt, nodding significantly. “I had a girlfriend who was thrown out of their community. You can’t be a drug addict and a Jehovah’s Witness. You get kicked out on your ass if you try, like she did . . . ”
He slammed his hand onto the table in indignation, blowing his pent-up breath through browned lips.
“It was pretty brutal on her. She had a husband and two children. Two boys. But she wasn’t allowed to see them, the boys. She claimed it was because of the religion, but between you and me . . . she was a junkie, right? I wouldn’t have entrusted any children to her either.”
The words penetrated my mind like an echo. A husband and two boys.
“Was she one of the girlfriends who stayed with you in Holstebro?”
He looked up at the ceiling and drew even more smoke deep down into his smoking lungs. “Yes, goddammit. Lea. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever had in the sack. Really beautiful. She got into treatment relatively quickly, pulled herself together, and then she dumped me, of course. To that extent, the drug scene operates the same way as the church. You can’t be together, if you are on opposite sides of the fence. But beautiful, that she was, Lea. And very, very unhappy.”
“Can you remember her surname?” Lea. The name sparked a rush of adrenalin.
“I could do with another beer.”
I went up to the bar again and blew my last twenty-five kroner. When I got back to the table I put the beer down in front of him again, and waited.
“I would really like to help you,” he said. “It sounds like your life has been pretty hard. But I can’t remember her surname. That kind of thing isn’t important when you’re a junkie. She worked the streets for me a couple of times. I needed the money. We both did. So we could buy some stuff, but otherwise . . . I don’t know her full name, all I know is that she wanted her family back. Or start a new one. She talked about that a lot. She was an angry woman. But they all are. Full of problems.”
He pointed to his temple meaningfully. “Some people just can’t tolerate life.”
I nodded. The same could be said for all of Friheden’s clientele that evening. It was a place for people allergic to their own pulse.
“Do you know where she is now?”
He shrugged. “I could bang the jungle drums for you, if you want. Find out if there’s anyone
who knows someone who knows someone, if you know what I mean.” He smiled eagerly. “Give me a call, okay? Maybe I could find out something for you.”
Troels Pinholt put one of his warm, dry hands over mine.
“I’m a lonely man, Ella. Do you know what it’s like to be so terribly lonely? I hope you will come and see me again.”
“Sure I will,” I lied. I wasn’t completely heartless.
33
Alex fell asleep as soon as we headed out of Aalborg.
The light of the street lamps played over his sleeping face in an uneven rhythm. It had cooled down, and I twisted round to the back seat and laid Thomas’s thin jacket over him.
“So? Did you manage to talk to that friend of yours?”
Thomas shifted gears. The sky was black over the car, making the stars shine with a brilliance that could never be seen in the yellow-grey night skies of Hvidovre. I rested my forehead against the window and focused on the Big Dipper. Perhaps a teacher had pointed it out to me. Perhaps it had been my mother, or my father. It irked me that I couldn’t remember which.
“Yes. Luckily he was home.”
“You smell of smoke.”
“We went to a bar.”
“A guy? That surfer . . . ?”
I tried to hide my irritation. Was the whole fucking town keeping track of my sex life? Not even in the concrete blocks of Hvidovre did I have such a pervasive sense of constant supervision.
“I’m fucking the surfer,” I said. “We don’t go to bars. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Okay.”
Thomas sank a little deeper into his seat, keeping his eyes on the road. I felt like I ought to break the silence. It was his car, after all, and he had just spent an evening and a not insignificant amount of money on popcorn and seeing Spider Man 2 with Alex.
“I’m looking for someone,” I said. “A woman who could tell me a little more about my mother. She had a friend called Lea. It sounds like they met in a support group for former Jehovah’s Witnesses. I know this from my . . . aunt.”